pftaylor, after looking at your pictures, I can't feel but to say that they look a little lifeless... the flavor may have been good, but there is something to say about tooth and mouth feel... They remind me a little bit like DKM's cracker crust type pie where there is some push for leavening but the bite of the crust is lacking life....is this what you were trying for?? This is not your best work...

Judging only from the pictures I can understand your view. I will concede that Pizza Sophia was a little on the thin side due to the ball size being about 13.6oz for a 16" pie. However, it was not a dry pie at all. I would have to arm wrestle you on that one. The crust was rather moist and soft actually. Surprising I know. I would be the first to admit if the Caputo got the best of me again but seriously the pie had the best flavor of any pie I've ever eaten. The contrast between the crispy bottom and the very wet top sealed the deal in my book. The two ends of the spectrum couldn't have been much further apart. That dicotomy of texture is award-winning in my book.

Could it of been a little thicker? Sure. And the next one will. I'm not sure Italian dough is meant to be stretched as thin as what I was able to do today. But remember, I used an American dough recipe. Adjustments can be made. But you can't make the boat load of flavor on demand.

The crust actually stuck to our teeth a little bit - much the same way Patsy's in NY does. Got rather chewy and then melted in our mouths. I would take that tooth and mouth feel everytime.

Now what can be improved? Lots of things; spring, a fluffy middle (which was completely missing), foldability, and thickness to name a few.

But, when you consider it was my first legit effort which produced such a great and unbelievably light crust and you then combine it with stellar taste, well, fa-get-about-it!

I'm away from my home base on vacation and just checked in to see what I have been missing. I'm delighted to see that you have made some inroads on the Caputo 00 flour. I hope you will at some point consider using a version of Pizza Napoletana's Neapolitan pizza dough recipe to make a dough using only the Caputo 00 flour, your Caputo 00 preferment and a long period of room temperature fermentation/ripening. As you know from my posts on this thread, I got powerful flavors out of the crusts based on that combination. With your grill, I would think you would get a very good product. I can't say that it will be as good as your Sophia pizza, but the only way to know is to give the Pizza Napoletana recipe a try.

Pete-zza,Glad to hear you are taking a well deserved break. I have good and bad news. Want it like a man with the bad news first?

I thought so. I destroyed my beloved Caputo preferment when Varasano sent his Patsy's poolish. Since Steve had already sent Varasano's poolish a few days earlier, that would have been 3 preferments for 2 refrigerators. I could not take a chance on contaimination. Something had to give and I decided to keep Varasano's new preferment and Steve's (potentially cross infected poolish). So I had to discard the Caputo biga which served me well.

The good news is I would be more than willing to incorporate the Varasano preferment into pizzanapoletana's recipe should that serve a meaningful purpose.

You might want to start with the recipe and amounts of ingredients specified in Reply #23, although you can use multiples of those amounts if you want to make more than one pizza. The last Caputo pizza I made used an autolyse, which you may or may not want to incorporate in your experiment. In the pizza described in Reply #23 I used the mimimum preferment. You can increase the amount of the preferment you'd like, but you may want to keep the amount of preferment between 1-5% of the weight of water (not flour). You might also be able to eliminate the oil. I used it because I was baking in a standard home oven.

Sorry if this has been covered earlier, but am I correct in assuming that with my 550 degeree oven this dough will end up being too dense? I really want to make an authentic pizza like what they serve in Naples, but I live in downtown Boston without a high end grill, and no self cleaning cycle on the oven in my rented apartment. I would just go ahead and try this recipe rather than asking about it, but I am still trying to decide if I am going to commit to picking up the huge amount of flour needed for the minimum order of Caputo.

scott r,I'm not certain I would agree. Pete-zza uses a 550 degree oven and has loads of spring. I do not detect his dough being dense at all. I think its worth the investment.

I took a couple of pictures of the dough ball I just finished making. I thought it would have been slack since every other dough ball I've made without commercial yeast has been so. However, after the mixing process and just after hand kneading for a minute or so the dough sprang to life and exhibited elasticity just like a normal ball. I'm beginning to think the the recommended mixing and stretching didactics offered for Pizza Raquel have a powerful affect on all kinds of dough.

If not, they are the best tasting tomatoes available in the world. Better tasting than San Marzanos by far. They are grown only in Florida. And for that matter, they are only available in Florida. Why?

Because they are butt ugly. The tomato farmers in Florida which supply about half the winter tomatoes for the US are afraid that their ugly appearance will scare folks off so they have banned their shipment across the state line. Shame.

Well, that pretty much describes the Caputo Pizzeria 00 pie I just made. It tasted great but was ugly. See for yourself:

Tonight I made my most recent version of a Caputo 00 dough based on a natural preferment. What I was hoping to prove to myself is that it was possible to make a room-temperature fermented Caputo 00 dough with a kitchen temperature hovering around a toasty 80 degrees F (and 100 degrees F outside). I felt that this would be a real challenge inasmuch as fellow member pizzanapoletana (Marco) had indicated that the ideal fermentation temperature for a Caputo 00 room-temperature fermented dough is 64.4-68 degrees F. And with about 24 hours of room-temperature fermentation staring me in the face, I knew that I would have to take measures I hadn’t taken before.

So, I basically redesigned Marco’s basic Caputo 00 recipe to fit my circumstances. First, I lowered the hydration percent from around 61% to 58%. This was done since Marco had indicated in one of his posts that using a considerably higher hydration percent for a Caputo 00 dough to be baked in a home oven could backfire and produce a crackery crust rather than a tender one. Also, I theorized that using the lower hydration level would slow down the fermentation process. Second, I reduced the amount of preferment to 2%, also on the theory that that would also result in a slower fermentation. Third, I made a small cooling unit out of an insulated picnic cooler with the idea of cooling down my dough enough so that it would make it out to 24 hours without overfermenting. I will discuss this makeshift cooler in greater detail below.

Another departure from my usual “Marco recipe” was to add some dairy whey to the Caputo 00 dough. This had nothing to do with the temperature issue discussed above. Rather, it was used in an effort to coax more color out of the crust—to darken it a bit so it wouldn’t have the characteristic white-to-tan color of 00 doughs that are baked in a home oven. As I recently reported at the A16 thread, dairy whey includes around 70 percent lactose, a milk sugar. It’s the only simple sugar that is not metabolized by yeast. But it contributes to browning of the crust. Another advantage is that lactose has a low sweetness factor, so it won’t be detected in the crust. So you get the benefit of better color but not the accompanying sweetness. The usual rate of use of dairy whey is around 4% by weight of flour—which was the amount I recently used for experimentation purposes. I lowered it this time to 2% just to see how much browning that might provide at the reduced level.

As usual, I included some oil in the dough, in the form of olive oil, which Marco had indicated was perhaps necessary in order to bake a room-temperature fermented Caputo 00 dough in a home oven. I left the salt at it usual high level to ensure proper gluten development and also to decelerate the fermentation process a bit (and to provide flavor, of course).

The basic recipe I ended up with, including the baker’s percents, is as follows:

The preferment used in the above recipe was one that I made in a dough-like form from a considerably more liquid preferment that had been given to me by a friend. To do this, I took the more liquid preferment directly from the refrigerator and refreshed it with flour and water (warm) but with enough added flour to achieve a dough-like consistency that could be handled just like a piece of dough. In a sense, it was like a “new” “old dough”. I then put the preferment in a covered bowl on my kitchen countertop to ferment. I estimated that it might take around 4-6 hours to just about double in volume. And that’s just about what happened. After 4 hours, it had doubled in volume and just crept up a bit more over the next 2 hours. That is when I used it to make the basic Caputo 00 dough.

To make the dough itself, I first placed the salt and the water into a bowl and stirred until the salt was dissolved. I then added the preferment and the dairy whey, mixed them in, and then gradually added the bulk of the flour and stirred them together with a wooden spoon until no more flour could be taken up into the dough ball. I added the olive oil and stirred that in. I hand kneaded the rest of the flour into the dough ball on a work surface, and kneaded it for a few more minutes until the dough ball was smooth and elastic. I then let the dough ball rest (riposo) for 15 minutes.

As mentioned above, I assembled a cooler unit out of my picnic cooler to hold the dough during fermentation. To lower the temperature within the cooler, I placed one tray’s worth of ice cubes into a metal cookie tin. I then placed a plastic container directly on top of the ice, and, finally put the container holding the dough on top of the other container. That way the dough wouldn’t come in direct contact with the ice. I then closed the cooler and set it aside. From time to time I would check the temperature within the cooler to see if what I had constructed was working. I had hoped that the temperature of the ice, at 32 degrees F, and the dough at a finished dough temperature of around 84 degrees F., would reach a state of equilibrium somewhere around 60-70 degrees F for at least several hours before the ice completely melted. And that’s what happened. After 12 hours, when I removed the dough from the cooler, it was around 65-70 degrees F. At this point, I replaced the melted water with fresh ice cubes and put the dough back into the cooler for another 6 hours. For its entire stay in the cooler, the dough didn’t budge at all. It just sat there. Since I was planning to use the dough to make a pizza in the early evening, I brought the dough out to room temperature and let it sit on my kitchen counter for another 6 hours where I could more carefully observe its behavior. Thus, the total elapsed time was around 24 hours. The dough by this time had slouched from a round ball into a disk-like shape. Because of this, it was hard to tell whether it had expanded in volume over the last six hours.

As time came to shape the dough I found it very easy to handle, pat, shape and stretch. Using my knuckles and the force of gravity, I stretched the dough without difficulty out to 12 inches but it was readily apparent that I could have stretched it out even further. What caught my attention, however, was how this dough behaved very similarly to another Caputo 00 dough I had made recently using the dairy whey. This has me wondering whether dairy whey, in addition to its other perceived benefits, also contributes to better dough handling qualities.

After the dough was dressed, in a simple Margherita style, it was baked on a pizza stone that had been preheated for about an hour in a 500-550 degree F oven. After 5 minutes of baking on the stone, I removed the pizza to the top oven rack and let the pizza bake for one more minute under the broiler element, which had been turned on 4 minutes into the bake process. The crust clearly browned more and faster than prior Caputo 00 doughs I have made, which I attributed to the dairy whey. Because of this, I am inclined to use dairy whey in just about all my future Caputo 00 doughs. It seems to be effective.

The finished pizza itself was excellent. The crust was soft and tender in the middle and chewy and crunchy moving out to the cornicione (rim). During baking, I had noticed that there was very good oven spring, with large bubbles in the area of the dough that was not covered by toppings. The flavor of the crust was also very good, with a nice, mild sourdough flavor. I am reasonably convinced that I could have let the dough go out several hours more and increased the flavor of the crust even more. About the only thing that didn’t play out as I had hoped is that I forgot to put some fresh basil on the pizza. Since I can’t show the basil on the pizza, I can at least show my “estate-grown basil” on my back patio.

Last night I made another experimental Caputo 00 pie. The main purpose of the pie was to see if I could increase the coloration of the crust, a common problem with baking Caputo 00 crusts in a home oven. I had previously experimented with using dry dairy whey, and reported (favorably) on the results of those experiments--both at this thread and the A16 thread--but yesterday’s experiment tested an entirely different approach. This approach was based on the conversion of damaged starch in the Caputo 00 flour to sugar.

For those who are unfamiliar with damaged starch, it is starch that is primarily damaged during milling. But it is important to the overall success of a dough because it is this damaged starch that is attacked by enzymes (principally alpha amylase) to produce sugar to feed the yeast during fermentation and to provide sugar to be used to color the crust. Unlike domestic flours, and especially those based on hard red wheat, the Italian 00 flours, including the Caputo 00 flour, have less starch damage than our domestic flours. To improve starch conversion to sugar in U.S. flours (and to speed up fermentation), it is common for millers to add diastatic barley malt to their flours. The diastatic barley malt provides extra alpha amylase enzyme beyond that originally present in the flour before malting. To the best of my knowledge, Italian millers do not malt their 00 flours, and judging from the limited specs I have seen for the Caputo 00 pizzeria flour (e.g., a high “falling number”), Molino Caputo, the miller of the Caputo 00 flour, does not.

I decided to see if I could increase the amount of starch damage in Caputo 00 flour and then add diastatic barley malt, which is commonly available in food outlets, with the objective of increasing the amount of sugar extracted from the flour. I was particularly looking for an increase in residual sugar, the sugar that remains after the yeast is fed and is in the dough at the time of baking. I theorized that this residual sugar would then be available for increased crust coloration (browning). My first instinct was to run the Caputo 00 flour through my Cuisinart food processor—to, in effect, pulverize it and damage some of the starch molecules. Since I wasn’t sure that this would work, I asked Tom Lehmann through a post at the PMQ Think Tank forum if that approach would work. He replied that he thought that it would work and even suggested an alternative approach. (For those who are interested in our exchange, see http://www.pmq.com/cgi-bin/tt/index.cgi/read/20279 .) In my case, I simply decided just to drop the Caputo 00 flour I planned to use in the recipe down the chute of my food processor, a tablespoon at a time, while the processor was operating at full speed.

For the recipe I selected for the experiment, I decided to use a natural preferment for a Caputo 00 dough that would be fermented entirely at room temperature, for a total of around 13 hours. To sustain that long a period of fermentation/ripening, and because of my above normal room temperature (far above the ideal range of 64.4-68 degrees F recommended by pizzanapoletana), I reduced the amount of preferment from a typical 20% (by weight of flour) to 15%. The final recipe I used, including baker’s percents, was as follows:

In preparation for making the dough, I had to ready the preferment. The night before I was to make the dough, I took a small portion of one of my semi-liquid natural preferments and refreshed it with an equal amount of flour and warm water. I then covered it and put it on my kitchen countertop to ferment overnight, a period of about 8 hours. By that time it had a lot of little bubbles and was ready to use. To make the dough itself, I first dissolved the salt in the water, then stirred in the preferment and the olive oil, and gradually added most of the flour, to which the diastatic malt had been added, and mixed them all together, using a wooden spoon, until a rough but still wet dough ball had formed. I finished kneading the dough by hand on a work surface using the remaining flour. As is often the case when working with semi-liquid preferments, a small amount of additional flour was needed to achieve the proper smooth, silky and elastic dough ball and also to adjust the total dough ball weight to the preestablished value (12.32 oz. in this case). The final kneading process took only a few minutes.

The finished dough ball was put into a plastic container and placed (covered) on my kitchen countertop. After 6 hours, the dough had barely risen and had slumped into a flatter shape. I just reshaped and rerounded it, mainly to get a feel and sense of the condition of the dough. It then went through additional fermentation/ripening for about another 7 hours. The dough volume increased only gradually over most of that time, but started to expand quickly during the last few hours, about doubling in volume. I then removed the dough to shape into a skin. The dough was very soft and a bit on the damp side, but that was easily overcome by a small amount of bench flour. The dough handled very nicely, although it was more extensible than elastic. But I had no problems whatsoever shaping it out to the desired 13-inch round. It exhibited some bubbling but not much.

The dough was dressed in simple Margherita style and baked on a pizza stone that had been placed on the lowest oven rack and preheated for about one hour at around 500-550 degrees F. Although the crust exhibited reasonable browning during the 5 minutes it was on the stone, it was not the degree of color I was hoping for. So I moved the pizza to the top oven rack and exposed it to the broiler element, which had been turned on about 4 minutes into the bake cycle. The crust browned up almost immediately, faster than I normally achieve using just the Caputo 00 flour by itself. It was under the broiler element for a bit under a minute.

The finished crust was one of the best I have made with the Caputo 00 flour. It was chewy, crispy, with a lot of flavors of fermentation—subtle but clearly in evidence. It’s hard to explain, but parts of the crust had almost a layered effect, with a hint of flavor reminiscent of butter (almost like a croissant). There was also good oven spring in the crust, and a nice crumb, but without being--or tasting--bready. The rim (cornicione) was normal size and shape, although I could see puffiness as the pizza was baking.

More work remains to be done to determine the reproducibility of the crust, and to test using different amounts of diastatic malt (I had used the amount that fellow member David came up with from his research on diastatic malt) and other possible techniques for achieving damaged starch in the Caputo 00 flour.

Recently, after experimenting with the San Felice flour (see Reply 40 at page 3 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=2951.msg25630#msg25630), I decided to apply the basic principles and concepts used there, with some modification, to the Caputo 00 Pizzeria flour using a natural preferment. The basic formulation I used for the most recent Caputo version was as follows:

There are several things that bear mentioning in relation to the above formulation. First, the hydration, at 61%, was selected to be as high as possible. Second, the preferment was in liquid form, about the consistency of pancake batter. I chose to use the liquid form purely for experimental purposes, understanding that Marco (pizzanapoletana) normally recommends a stiffer preferment. Third, the preferment, at 4% by weight of flour, had been refreshed and allowed to sit for several hours at room temperature before using and was slightly above the 5% upper limit as a percent of water as usually recommended by Marco, but just slightly. I chose the slightly higher amount to insure a hopefully slightly faster fermentation. Even at that, the preferment was just about a teaspoon. Fourth, the thickness factor selected, 0.09, was quite a bit higher than normally used for authentic Neapolitan pizzas. I chose the higher level because I was using a home oven and did not want to end up with a cracker-like crust. Fifth, the formulation does not call for any oil. I elected to omit it on the theory that the thicker dough would render it unnecessary.

The procedure I followed to make the dough was as follows. I started by placing the warm water in the bowl of my standard KitchenAid stand mixer. I then added the salt and stirred it into the water with a spoon until completely dissolved, about 30 seconds. I added the preferment and, using my fingers, I dissolved the preferment into the “brine”. I then added about 2/3 to 3/4 of the flour to the bowl, by about a tablespoon at a time, and mixed everything together. I used only the “stir” speed of the mixer and, as the ingredients were mixing, I used a long thin-bladed plastic spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl and move the ingredients into the path of the dough hook. Once the flour was absorbed, but without creating a glutinous structure (which I did not want at this stage), I continued to add the remaining flour, continuously but gradually, until it was absorbed into the dough mass. Again, using only the “stir” speed of my mixer, I kneaded just until the dough cleared the sides of the bowl with a bit of the dough sticking to the round convex protrusion at the center of the mixing bowl. To get the dough to this exact stage, I made slight adjustments to the amounts of flour and water during the kneading process. I have found this to be a reliable way of getting the dough consistency I am after, in this case, a slightly wet and tacky dough that just wants to stick to your fingers and not pull away.

Once the dough was finished, I subjected it to a 15-minute riposo (rest) within the bowl itself (covered to prevent a crust from forming). At the end of the riposo, I put the dough on a lightly-floured work surface and used the standard punch and fold technique recommended by pieguy and others in order to get better dough strength to retain the gases of yeast fermentation. Because the dough was still sticky and wanting to stick to the work surface, I used a bench knife to manipulate the dough, as is often done with high-hydration bread doughs (ciabatta dough being a good example). After about a couple of minutes of doing this, I put the dough in a container that was minimally oiled just at the bottom and sides to keep the dough from sticking and to facilitate its later removal from the container. The container (covered) was then put into my temperature-controlled wine unit which was at about 55-65 degrees F temperature, or roughly within the ideal 64.4-68 degrees F (18-20 degrees C) recommended by Marco.

While the dough was in the wine unit, I periodically monitored its development. I was especially mindful of the rise of the dough. Marco had on several occasions mentioned that during the first stage of fermentation the dough should not rise noticeably, and that after reshaping and dividing the dough it should rise but not double or triple in volume during the second stage of fermentation. I discovered that, with the parameters of my particular dough, the dough did not start to rise noticeably for about 36 hours after it went into the wine unit (which leads me to believe that I needed more preferment or else the wine unit may have been a bit too cool). I then reshaped the dough, which I believe may be a necessary step for even a single dough ball (but don’t ask me why yet), and let the dough ferment/ripen for about another 8 hours. During that additional 8 hours, the dough rose by about 50%. What was most significant, however, was that I could see a profusion of gas bubbles that had formed at the bottom and sides of the container (I was using a translucent Rubbermaid container). To me, this was a telltale indicator that the dough was most likely in good shape. I deem the visual indicator to be an important one to heed in future efforts.

The dough was shaped into a roughly 13” round on a very lightly floured work surface. The dough was wet and sticky to the touch and I preferred to keep it that way as much as possible and not to add too much bench flour, which would defeat the purpose of the high hydration in the first place and also possibly produce bitterness in the finished crust. I was able to lift it and stretch it to the 13-inch size even though it was highly extensible and to get it onto a lightly dusted peel. After dressing the skin, I deposited it onto a pizza stone (on the lowest oven rack position) that I had preheated for about an hour at around 500-550 degrees F. After about 5-6 minutes on the stone, I then transferred it to the top oven rack position and exposed the pizza to about 1 to 2 minutes of direct heat from the broiler element, which I had turned on during the final minute or two on the stone.

The photos below show the finished product. The pizza (a cheese pizza) was very good, with excellent crust flavor, chewiness, softness, and with decent oven spring. It was not cracker-y in any respect and did not have a bread-like consistency that Marco maintains is inappropriate for an authentic Neapolitan pizza. I am sure that there are additional improvements to be achieved, most likely in the management of the preferment in my case, but I do believe that the totality of procedures I used and described above to make and manage the dough are sound in principle and concept and will produce very good results in a home oven environment.

After making the last Caputo pizza, I decided to make another dough similar to the last one but using the Camaldoli preferment as the leavening agent instead of my standard preferment. Also, this time, I elected to use a more solid form for the preferment, at a rate of 3.1% by weight of flour, or 5% by weight of water. Since the Camaldoli preferment had been in existence for only 2 days in my household as it was being nurtured by the periodic addition of flour and water, I was not sure how it would perform, especially since I was using only 1 teaspoon (0.22 ounces) as compared with a total dough weight of almost 12 ounces. However, I have often wondered how soon a preferment might be used so I viewed the opportunity as a learning experience. The final formulation I used was as follows:

The processing of the dough was the same in all respects as with the last Caputo dough. However, this time the gas bubbles did not start to form in the fermenting dough until somewhere between 18 hours, when I reshaped the dough, and 30 hours. As in recent experiments using both the Caputo and San Felice flours, the formation of the bubbles as the dough started to rise--and which were clearly visible in my Robbermaid container--was a good visual indicator that the dough was approaching the point where it could be used. A few hours thereafter, the dough had risen by a total of about 50%, with a much greater presence of gas bubbles. Although the dough was soft and very extensible, it was easily shaped into a 13” round, using only a small amount of bench flour. The dough was then dressed and baked—all in accordance with the procedures previously described.

The photos below show the finished product. As a departure from the usual toppings, this time I dispensed with the usual mozzarella cheese and instead used a small amount of shredded imported Provolone cheese which was distributed over the dough round. The sauce was a pureed uncooked tomato sauce (Stanislaus Alta Cucinas), and the toppings included sliced fresh garlic, caramelized onions, anchovies, fresh and dried imported oregano, and a scattering of capers. I also used some of the oil from the jar of anchovies to coat the rim of the dough to add a bit more flavor to the crust. After the pizza was baked, I sprinkled some freshly-grated Grana Padano cheese over the pizza.

The pizza was quite tasty, with a nicely flavored, chewy crust with a bit of crunch on the rim. There was some oven spring but not as pronounced as the last Caputo pizza. But the crust was not cracker-y. It was soft. I am hopeful that as the Camaldoli culture gets some time and experience under its belt in my home setting, it will perform better and--hopefully--faster, as its reputation suggests I can reasonably expect. What was impressive, however, is how little preferment can be used, even in its early stages.

As a further test of my newly acquired Ischia culture, I decided to do a side-by-side fermentation test of two Caputo dough balls—one fermented at room temperature and the other at the temperature of my wine unit. As it so happened, as a result of a hot streak here in Texas, my room temperature got up to around 75 degrees F yesterday afternoon when I made the two dough balls. By contrast, my wine unit seems to average around 60 degrees or so, or a difference of about 15 degrees F from yesterday’s ambient room temperature. This was an ideal set of circumstances because, as noted before on this forum, for every 15 degrees increase in temperature (up to around 100 degrees F), the rate of fermentation doubles. This statement comes from General Mills and applies to dough using commercial yeast, however I wanted to see how well it applies to a dough fermented with a natural starter, like the Ischia.

The two dough balls were identical and made from a single dough batch that was divided into the two dough balls of equal weight and placed into respective Rubbermaid containers. Except for using the Ischia preferment, which was in a liquid form, the dough formulation was the same as set forth in my last post (Reply 95). The procedure for making the dough was identical to that described in detail in Reply 94. The first dough ball, which I will call RT Dough, was allowed to ferment at the 75 degrees F room temperature, and the second dough ball, which I will call WU Dough, went into the wine unit, at around 60 degrees or so.

The photo below show the two dough balls after 12 hours. The RT Dough, with the blue rubber band delineating the start point, is at the left. The WU Dough, with the brown rubber band delineating its start point, is at the right. As can be readily seen, the RT Dough doubled in volume, whereas the WU Dough did not rise at all. It may not be fully apparent from the photo, but the RT Dough was filled with bubbles of fermentation.

The above test clearly demonstrates the power of temperature over the fermentation process. And, while there may be some differences between doughs using commercial yeast and natural leavening agents, all else being equal the two forms of yeast appear to behave similarly under the influence of temperature. The test also seems to suggest that to get the two dough balls to come out at the same place in terms of dough expansion, one would use about half the amount of preferment as was used for the RT Dough (i.e., halve the baker’s percent for the preferment), or one would double the amount of preferment as was used for the WU Dough (i.e., double the baker’s percent).

Of course, it is important to start the dough at the right time. Otherwise, one could discover that the dough is ready to be used to make pizzas at 3:00 AM. One advantage of having a wine unit is that it can be used to retard the fermentation of a dough that is rising too quickly. This provides some measure of control over the timing of making and using the dough. In fact, this morning, I put the RT Dough into the wine unit since it appeared to be ready, but I was not. When I last looked, the RT Dough has remained at the same level as after 10 hours. In due course, I hope that the WU Dough starts to catch up with the RT Dough. If not, I will have to look for ways to increase the rate of fermentation of dough in the wine unit without raising the temperature of the wine unit, which I would prefer to keep at its present setting for the benefit of my wine.

It should also be noted that different preferments can operate differently and that the form of the preferment, that is, a liquidy or thick form, can influence the fermentation process. The strength of the preferment, the dough batch size, the degree of hydration, and the amount of salt used can also influence the fermentation process. This is one of those areas where one has to do some experimentation to settle on the final, best solution. Bakers do this sort of thing all the time.

...About a week ago, I started a Caputo 00 biga following pftaylor's instructions, which included the addition of a small amount of IDY to the basic flour and water mixture...

... and a second one with another Caputo 00 biga I started recently using only the Caputo 00 flour and water. And no commercial yeast.

Peter

As belated as this may be, could you post the details of initiating, cultivating, and maintaining the second biga (without any IDY) that you used? I'm pretty sure it's 100% flour + 100% water, but what weights did you start with? Covered/uncovered? When is it ready, or not? How is it stored, when do you know if it's spoiled or "bad"?

You had great success with that biga, and I believe it is the one your preferred of the two mentioned above?

In retrospect, this thread, and especially the early parts of it, seems like eons ago. Shortly before I started the thread, Marco (pizzanapoletana) had joined the forum and had introduced us all to the notion of using a natural leavening (wild yeast) to make dough to make pizzas. I think is is fair to say that most of us had no idea of what we were doing but we forged ahead anyway, trying to leverage off of what Marco wrote, showed and instructed us to do, even if not with the greatest clarity (since he was in the process of writing a book and did not want to give away everything for free). Even the term "biga" turned out not to be technically correct but I came to learn later that that term was a pretty loose one and had been bastardized long before me. But, we all persevered and the exercise became one filled with mystery, surprise, enlightenment and accomplishment. And a lot of fun.

With respect to the Caputo "biga", it was simply a mixture of Caputo flour and water. I'm sure that I did not measure out the weights of the flour and water. That was something I would come to engage in later as a way of quantifying things in a more or less scientific way. It also became necessary to the design and use of the preferment dough calculating tool at http://www.pizzamaking.com/preferment_calculator.html. In my case, I just combined some Caputo flour and water in a glass container, stirred the mixture, and let it sit on my kitchen countertop. My recollection is that I took the mixture outdoors for a few hours in order to expose it to the wild Texas yeast in my area. I may have picked up a few bugs and airborne dust/debris in the process, but I simply scraped those out of the mixture. From that point on, I just watched for biochemical activity, specifically, the formation of small fermentation bubbles in the mixture.

Apparently my home is very hospitable to wild yeast because it only took a day or so for the fermentation bubbles to start to form. I periodically discarded part of the mixture and fed it again with more Caputo flour and warm water--just enough to maintain a uniform consistency (which I did mainly by "feel"). Ultimately, the strength of the culture developed to the point of being usable to leaven dough. In terms of the consistency of the culture, our regulars on the forum may recall that Marco talked about a fairly loose culture and a firmer one. The firm one was the one that he recommended be used for pizza dough. I believe the thinner culture could be used for leavening other yeasted goods, such as bread dough. Also, and very importantly, the amount of culture was very important, up to 5% of the formula water. Ultimately, I came to try and adopt all of those ideas in my experiments, as discussed in this thread and elsewhere on the forum. It also helped to read and re-read all of Marco's posts. Every time I did that, I learned something that escaped me in my prior readings. To this day, I routinely search his posts, either to refresh my memory on some point or to be able to post links for our members on different points.

I do appreciate you explaining the context of that thread and your efforts.

Maybe it's just me, but maintaining a starter sounds a lot like owning a dog!.... Take it outside, pick the bugs off it, wash it, feed it ..... Hmm..... Maybe I'll just tie a leash to it and drag it around with me. If I can only train it to fetch me a pizza.

Once you get it established, do you store it in the refrigerator until you need to use it again? Then how do you get it going again or prepare it for use after refrigeration? How often do you replace a portion of the water & flour mix in it?